SmartyPal’s “Our Space Adventure” wins 2017 Family Choice Award!

Our Space Adventure is a fun and educational cooperative game powered by SmartyPal. In this exciting story about a space mission, two players (parent/child, siblings, or friends) collaborate on the same device. Along the way the players have to discuss and make choices as a team and those choices alter the flow of the narrative. The tasks require critical thinking and teamwork to problem-solve and make tough decisions.

SmartyPal is a technology suite developed in partnership with leading educational researchers and funded by a National Science Foundation grant. SmartyPal was designed to take content from creators, often award-winning stories from videos or books, and build interactive elements into that content. For children’s content like Our Space Adventure, this process increases interest in the stories and improves their educational value. SmartyPal’s personalization and adaptation technologies then allow the activities to be tailored to each user, ensuring the content changes each time they play and that the challenge is set to their skill level. This same technology enables SmartyPal to track how well users are learning and provide that information via reports. As seen in Our Space Adventure, SmartyPal’s technology also allows users to cooperate on the same screen, which encourages children to play with their peers, siblings, and parents. For children, this can help take app play from an isolating activity to something that will encourage interaction and promote social-emotional development.